"The Almond started as a short study for trumpet for the British website Compost and Height. Wooley, a rising young composer known mostly for his radical recontextualization of the trumpet in improvisation and jazz music, was, at the time, feeling constricted by the sound based language he had been using up to that point in both his live solo playing and his earlier solo records. His goal was to make a true solo trumpet record, using only the trumpet as it was intended to be played with no extended techniques. This challenge spawned a 20-minute piece that, at the surface level, was a quick, arcing narrative made up glacially shifting textures of pure pitched sound. The process behind the piece was much more complex, however, as each pitch heard in the piece was made up of anywhere from three to ten different recordings of the trumpet recorded in different mutes, tunings, with different microphones, and in different rooms. The result was each note of the piece, now expanded to 70 minutes in its final version, takes on a synthesized aspect, sometimes sounding like a voice, others like an organ, but always maintaining some timbral tie to the trumpet. With the exception of one very low pedal tone, all the pitches are played on a regular embouchure, again a far cry from Wooley's usual work."